The basic idea is that there are multiple ways of getting from point A to B.
1. The standard - medium risk, long travel time
2. Trade route - low risk, very fast, costs money, no illegal/contraband permitted
3. Sneaky - high risk, very fast, cheap, can transport anything but very dangerous.

The topology has branches, each one with it's own set of enemy factions, difficulty increases the further out the arms you travel. Gaining rank in the classes will allow different travel options. The merchant can take trade routes for free and the smuggler will not be harassed as much taking the sneaky routes.

All the safe nodes will have equipment of all levels, but perhaps will specialize in something. One will be a rasiermesser HQ with lots of mining and manufacturing. One will be the breadbasket with lots of food for dirt cheap etc. All of them should have the basics available and can service basic equipment needs.

_________________Coming soon: The Syrtian War adventure mod!A Turret defense genre mod exploring the worst era in Earth's history.Can you defend the Earth from the Syrtian invaders?Stay tuned for updates!

This is a really great idea and I hope you all make progress on it--I whole-heartedly support it.

I have a few random thoughts:

1. One thing I'd like to do (maybe for 1.03) is to support modules in extensions--this would at least make the creation of such a project tactically more manageable.

2. I need to work to separate the storyline from the canonical parts. For example, the definitions for ship classes, items, basic dock screens, etc. are just canonical parts that can be used in any adventure (or overridden). But right now, something like the Huari storyline will get triggered no matter what adventure you choose.

3. As alterecco said in a post, this is a very ambitious project. Your best bet is to start small and simple and expand from there. You will be tempted to add every possible cool idea (and there are many). If you give in to that temptation, you will never finish.

4. Be conservative: Whenever possible, try to use standard techniques to implement this (i.e., techniques that are already being used in the game today). Otherwise you will either stall while you wait for enhancements or break when things change.

5. That said, if there are key things that I can change in the engine to give you leverage, please add it as a bug/enhancement in Trac and mark it as such. Even if it doesn't make it to 1.03 it probably will make 1.04. Let me know how I can help.

6. Consider a divide-and-conquer approach. One thing that worked well when you all created the Captain's Primer was to assign a different section to one person. That way, one person was responsible for getting a meaningful chunk done. Of course, you will need to coordinate the pieces so that they fit together again.

7. Make sure you have a well-defined dispute resolution mechanism. You will all have different opinions about how to do things. How will you resolve those differences? Will it be by majority vote? Will it be by whoever is responsible? Whichever way, it often helps to spell it out in advance.

8. I recommend that you write down a simple outline of what the first version might look like. For example, how many missions will you create? How many levels can you advance as a Charon pirate? What can you do at each level? How will dynamic trading work? Feel free (obviously) to use the wiki to capture this.

This is a really great idea and I hope you all make progress on it--I whole-heartedly support it.

I have a few random thoughts:

1. One thing I'd like to do (maybe for 1.03) is to support modules in extensions--this would at least make the creation of such a project tactically more manageable.

2. I need to work to separate the storyline from the canonical parts. For example, the definitions for ship classes, items, basic dock screens, etc. are just canonical parts that can be used in any adventure (or overridden). But right now, something like the Huari storyline will get triggered no matter what adventure you choose.

3. As alterecco said in a post, this is a very ambitious project. Your best bet is to start small and simple and expand from there. You will be tempted to add every possible cool idea (and there are many). If you give in to that temptation, you will never finish.

4. Be conservative: Whenever possible, try to use standard techniques to implement this (i.e., techniques that are already being used in the game today). Otherwise you will either stall while you wait for enhancements or break when things change.

5. That said, if there are key things that I can change in the engine to give you leverage, please add it as a bug/enhancement in Trac and mark it as such. Even if it doesn't make it to 1.03 it probably will make 1.04. Let me know how I can help.

6. Consider a divide-and-conquer approach. One thing that worked well when you all created the Captain's Primer was to assign a different section to one person. That way, one person was responsible for getting a meaningful chunk done. Of course, you will need to coordinate the pieces so that they fit together again.

7. Make sure you have a well-defined dispute resolution mechanism. You will all have different opinions about how to do things. How will you resolve those differences? Will it be by majority vote? Will it be by whoever is responsible? Whichever way, it often helps to spell it out in advance.

8. I recommend that you write down a simple outline of what the first version might look like. For example, how many missions will you create? How many levels can you advance as a Charon pirate? What can you do at each level? How will dynamic trading work? Feel free (obviously) to use the wiki to capture this.

9. Have fun! This sounds like a great project!

First off, thanks for the input, it was just an idea we happened to be discussion while chatting and it seemed to work good.

I do like the idea of the rough idea and dividing the stuff into groups, it would save time and alot of effort. Even now several people have found their mods provide support for features that we are trying to implement. Code and implementations used by previous modders are being looked into.

regarding the addition of features to transcendence, we were posting some already (mainly the dynamic methods for system generation), additions regarding any system generation though code would be great.

Out of curiosity how complete is the lisp implementation in Transcendence?

Thank you so much for your approval, and good luck with development of the game! Any other suggestions are welcome as ever too.

* large mesh topology
* shops refresh
* most enemies befriendable at the price of existing friendlies becoming hostile (eg. losing commonwealth as friends if you join pirates)
* increase gradiation esp of noncombat equipment
* enable ship swapping
* fix the economy, which pretty much has to be done last

I think the topology is where the engine could help the most. It's currently not very readable for doing nonlinear topologies.

Refreshing shops is being worked on already I think.

Befriending can be done based on the examples of the huari and black market.

Redoing the mining equipment and cargo holds is practically trivial.

Ship swapping is already being worked on.

Fixing the economy just requires a whole lot of people playing the game to test if the money sinks are adequate. It may eventually require the implementation of loan payments or taxes to provide enough drag to use the default prices.

Even though it will be possible to do a large mod without, and add in some topo randomization there is at least one function that allows us to add new nodes to the topo (this is currently the most limiting factor, since we can easily create gates between existing nodes). So a function with this signature would be an immense change to topology creation

It would create a new node in the topology from the passed in system, and allow us to set the base attributes we would normally set in the topology. It should return False if it fails (eg. duplicate nodeID)

Tue Aug 10, 2010 3:20 pm

Prophet

Militia Captain

Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2008 6:09 pmPosts: 826

I made do with what we have, and it works great.

One thing that will help, when the time comes to actually build the systems is access to the <systemTypes> element and the <Tables> inside it. I realize we can add tables to individual systems, but if we want to change the labels or any other minor cosmetic change, we have to have copies of those tables in every system it's used.

Another item on my wishlist for topology was a LevelTable for stations, much like the ships have that could be used in the system <Tables> to provide more control over station placement at the time its generated.

_________________Coming soon: The Syrtian War adventure mod!A Turret defense genre mod exploring the worst era in Earth's history.Can you defend the Earth from the Syrtian invaders?Stay tuned for updates!

Tue Aug 10, 2010 3:33 pm

george moromisato

Developer

Joined: Thu Jul 24, 2003 9:53 pmPosts: 2739

alterecco wrote:

Even though it will be possible to do a large mod without, and add in some topo randomization there is at least one function that allows us to add new nodes to the topo...

I understand that it could be useful--but I'm not sure how you would actually use it in practice in this project. Every change that I make takes time. And I'd rather concentrate on required changes rather than nice-to-have features.

Edit: I should say, however, that I'm open to the idea--I just want to understand whether it is required for the project or simply a good idea.

Last edited by george moromisato on Tue Aug 10, 2010 4:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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